Parcel encroachment

Encroachment

When an object's position is on one parcel of land but part of it extends into a neighboring parcel, often against the wishes of the neighbor.

The problem is that residents can place objects such that they are on their own parcels but invade the space of their neighbor's. In January 2011 a partial solution was deployed. Estate owners can now enable a feature that allows people to manually return objects that encroach upon their parcels.

As of 15 March 2012, this feature has been enabled on all Linden Owned mainland regions.

How it works

First of all the returnability of encroaching objects must be enabled on a per-region basis. See the How To Enable section for information on how do do this.

When someone tries to return an object the server will first check the normal object and parcel permissions and if those fail it will then build a collision body in the physics engine for nearby parcels and then perform a collision query between the object and the parcels. If the object overlaps one of their parcels then it will be returned.

Some regions use encroachment as a feature, where large "public works" structures overlap privately owned parcels. To protect such content the encroachment returnability feature has been split between regular privately owned content and estate-content that is owned by the Estate Managers. The returnability of regular overlapping content can be enabled while blocking return of overlapping estate-content.

How to Enable

Here is how to enable the encroachment returnability feature:

1. Install a recent viewer that supports the Sim Console feature.
2. Login as an Estate Manager
3. Open the Sim Console with Ctrl+Shift ⇧+` ( ` is the grave accent, commonly below Esc on QWERTY keyboards)
4. Type the following command: set allow_return_encroaching_object true
5. To allow return of estate content type: set allow_return_encroaching_estate_object true
6. To check whether the feature is enabled or not type: get allow_return_encroaching_object

Misc Details and Known Bugs

• The returnability logic relies on the object's physical shape which can differ from its visible shape. There may be cases where an object appears to overlap but is not returnable, or visa versa.
• Visible and physical shape mismatch will be worst for the following objects:
  • trees and grass
  • sculpty prims
  • flexi prims
  • static objects using the llTargetOmega() feature -- they appear to be spinning but are not spinning in the physics engine
• Phantom and Volume Detect objects will still collide for encroachment.
• Encroachment across region boundaries is not yet supported but is under development.